Quote:
Originally Posted by KevinTMC
One suggestion I have would be to devote significant space in the manual to the ABA quickstart.
As I understand it, a major reason behind having this nicely-developed out-of-the-box playing mode was to provide an easier point of entry for more novice players. (Which I still kinda consider myself to be, even though OOTP 9 is my third purchase in the series, going back to the "Season Ticket Baseball" days. There's just so much here!) There should be a friendly introduction to the quickstart that is written with this in mind, covering, for instance:
* Some notes on how the quickstart was designed
* Suggestions on how to start playing the quickstart (setting up the human manager, deciding what role to assume with what team, etc.)
* Notes on the features that have been turned on, or turned off, by default
Really, anything that reduces the "cool...but gosh, what do I do now?" effect--at each point along the way, from the first time the game is launched, to the point where a newbie starts to feel a little comfortable and more than a little hooked--would be a big help I think.
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Why was it designed?
I put this together after the concept of having a totally modded league file was batted around in the OOTP 2007 Beta process. It was not acted upon then, as we had bigger fish to fry. The idea was one of about 500 topics for discussion when a group on OOTP players gathered in suburban Philadelphia one evening with battists and Andreas Raht. The idea was floated again during this beta, too.
No one really picked the ball up on this one or was assigned the task. I just told battists that I was going to do it, and went and did it.
I had the idea of creating a league with all uniforms and logos custom made, but in a way that would allow them to be shipped with the game itself. This meant fairly generic logos. I also had the idea of adding a bunch of board members into the file as players.
About 30-45 minutes after deciding to do this, I had a poll up about the issue, to determine some of the factors. The league size was set at 16 teams, and 3 levels of minors, because I did not want to go the modders and ask for 128 sets of uniforms. The public was given a sketch of the idea, and they voted on the league name and the cities.
I picked the team names to speed things up to get information to the modders ASAP. Justafan and No Pepper came up with some wonderful stuff for the uniforms, logos, and then Sitting Duck helped rename the files to add team and text colors to the file without me having to manually key in those factors.
I think the graphics for the ABA are top notch, despite me crippling their creativity with the specification that no pre-existing copyrighted material could be used. I made it extra hard on the modders. They really came through.
Team names were selected by my whim in the majors after asking board members for suggestions. Several were used. I really like the pun used for the Detroit Bears, as Motown is home to the real-world Lions and Tigers. The GHL names were picked by reading information about each Canadian city on wikipedia, and on the city website operated by the various governments. The
Texas team names were offered up by Texan members of the boards. The Southern California league set up was extremely heavily based on a suggestion by The Wolf. I changed that just slightly after making a Google Map of his suggestion, and I was not happy about the way some stuff bunched up.
Southern California League map on Google.
South Texas League on Google.
Golden Horseshoe League on Google.
If you zoom in on each one of these locations to the street level, you'll see where each team plays its home games. I used Google maps to help me place the teams into different leagues based on geography.
ABA serves a couple of masters. One of the reasons behind the set was to show off the features of the game for use in screenshots and manuals. You saw that towards the end with some of the pictures that Markus posted. When Markus uses some of the real-world graphics mods for screenshots, it's dancing on thin ice with MLB. When Markus uses the default generic graphics and colors that the game uses for screenshots, it really is not putting the best foot forward for the game. The same thing applies for the manual. I hope to see some of the graphics in the manual be generated by using the ABA.
The public chose 1961 as the date for the game start. I always assumed that the game would start in 1961, then I would sim it 10 years to build history, then I'd zip it up to be shipped in OOTP 9. Then, someone (Moorsemoose, I think) asked a brilliant question to see if the quickstart would start in 1951, sim 10 years, and start in 1961, or start in 1961, sim 10 seasons, then ship in the year 1971. I polled that too, and the 1951 start was selected.
The ABA starts with 1951 real world finances and stat values, and will update itself using MLB data. That means that people that start in 1961 will start to see their offensive totals go into the tank.
Hidden players are on. I like that feature.
Free agency is off. Free agency should be turned on in 20 years or so.
There's no expansion. You have to do that manually.
Ghost players are on. I don't like managing a bunch of future used car salesmen in A ball.
I renamed all of the stadiums in the file, and made sure that all of those stadiums with retractable roofs, domes, and astroturf (except one...you'll have to find it, and baseball history fans should have a good laugh about it) at all levels. I also modified the capacity of each stadium, making them smaller.
Ratings were set at 1-100, because I wanted to.
I am sure there's more...